306 Bookkeepers: What To Know About Working With Tax Pros

Tax pros, Bookkeepers, man, can't we all just get along? There's so much overlap in the things that we do. And getting alignment and communicating can save both of us so much time and headache. If you're a bookkeeper, you're like, this would be so much easier if you would just call me first. Email me if you're a tax pro, you're like, do you know how busy I am right now? You think I have time for fifping over over journal entries? Let's talk about how we can better collaborate today. From me, a 15 year tax pro. I owned a 40 person tax firm, but then I launched a practice that did bookkeeping too. Today we're gonna try to get into some practical advice for bookkeepers to try to handle tax pros who can be, some can be great, some can be total, totally collaborative. Others can be total divas and a pain in your hiney. Come on in, it's Jason D. Hey. If you're new here, welcome. We spend every day hanging out talking about running small practices, tax accounting, bookkeeping, whatever you do. I used to run a practice myself and now frankly, I just tell people what to do. No, I don't. I talk with firm owners all day. I share the coolest stuff that I hear and we all try to get a little bit better. Okay, today we are focusing on the perspective of the bookkeeper. What should bookkeepers know to try to navigate collaborating with tax pros? A little. Try to do that as well as they can because that can be very tricky. Everything that we're going to cover today and tomorrow, we're covering the opposite perspective. What tax pros. I don't know about working with bookkeepers. I mean, there's no way, like everything here is inevitably a generalization and there will be people that fall outside of some of the things that we talk about. I spent most of my time on the tax pro side and I'm a cpa. So I, if I'm blind to either side of this, it's, it's more today than tomorrow. It's the bookkeeper's perspective. That being said, I did build a bookkeeping practice from scratch out of our firm, but I was like a tax pro building a bookkeeping practice. Now I put the call out on social media and in my newsletter and got a whole bunch of feedback from folks on frustrations, blind spots, all that. And that's kind of how I built this list. So thank you to all the people that contributed to that. And let's just, let's just Level set right now, if you're listening to this in the grand scheme of things, I would say you are way ahead of the curve, open to learning, open to new ideas, open to collaboration. The vast majority of tax pros and the vast majority of bookkeepers, they're not at that level. They're hustling, frankly, the only way that they know how to hustle because they haven't found something better yet. And a lot of the things that are hard for both sides, for tax pros, for bookkeepers, it is the folks who are just hustle and the only way they know how to hustle. So a lot of this honestly is not how do I work with people who are willing to be collaborative? Because that's not the problem. A lot of it's probably how do I work with the folks who just suck at being collaborative? How do I navigate that? So today I've got I think 11, 11 thoughts or I guess ideas for bookkeepers on how to navigate tax pros. Oh no, it's 1212 ideas and how we can do our best to deal with tax pros and all of their forms. Number one, and you probably already know this, tax pros can be incredibly quick to rush to judgment. Again, generalizing, they're not all this way. But many of them are things that are big time triggers for tax pros. Bank accounts, credit card statements not being reconciled like an actual proper reconciliation done. If you are using QuickBooks, Xero doesn't really have the equivalent. But with Xero you can run a, what's it called, a bank statement summary. There's some sort of actual report you can run that'll compare like the ledger balance to the bank statement balance. I either way, minimum expectation for the tax pro when they're coming in is if there is a professional bookkeeper, the bank accounts are reconciled. Tax pros do not believe in the opening balance equity account because it's kind of used as the plug when a new file is originally set up. And so when they see that this is like a hallmark of the the DIYer that didn't know what they were doing, they created this account and never did anything with that balance. There are people who use this account for completely legitimate ways, but because of that association, but because what that meant 95% of the time was somebody who didn't know what they were doing set up, set up the file. That's just kind of the immediate assumption that tax pros make. So even if you are using like an opening balance equity account for something meaningful, even if you just Call it something else. That's probably a good idea to avoid that association. Keep an eye on both the cash and accrual financials. Common issue here is the bookkeeper may only be paying attention to one of them and the tax pro is paying attention to the other. This, this is a rundown of like the common sort of simple things that tax pros brought up. Accounts generally should have normal balances. That is, if it's an asset, generally it's going to have a debit balance. If it's credit, generally going to have a credit balance. Balance sheet accounts with negative balances, with a few exceptions, you generally shouldn't have. And again, watch out for both the cash and the accrual financial statements to see if that stuff's coming up. Personal income tax payments and tax expense accounts. The this is something tax pros don't wanna see. Tax payments generally are gonna go through distributions. That being said, this is also a situation where the business owner can tell the bookkeeper to do one thing and you're like, okay, I'll put it there. And then it goes to the tax person. And the tax person's like, why would the bookkeeper do this? And the bookkeeper gets blamed, right? And then last kind of quick hitter here. I've got the chart of accounts getting unnecessarily long is another thing where oftentimes it's the business owner's fault because they don't understand how that chart of accounts ought to work. They end up with, you know, for example, an account for every single software vendor or something like that. If the business owner is requesting this and you need some support to fight back against that chart of accounts getting too long, pull in the tax pro. Gang up on the business owner to say, like, let's consider whether you really need this or whether the information that you're needing can actually be served by just running a report by the vendor or something like that. Okay, second thing I've got here for bookkeepers to be aware of about tax pros. Tax pros work with a lot of really bad bookkeepers. I don't care how good of a bookkeeper you are, there are still a lot of bad ones. And as we're going to talk about tomorrow, that goes. That cuts both ways. Exact same thing goes for tax pros. But oftentimes really good professional bookkeepers will pay the price for bookkeepers who are not as good. Now, the good news is it means it's a pretty low bar. And so even just asking some questions of the tax pro about their preferences will go a long ways or even communicating your expectations. So the tax pro knows how best to work with you. Just broaching that conversation puts you ahead of the curve. But so often in the context of preparing somebody's tax return, you come to find out that this client is trying to DIY their books. Or they're like, oh, my partner can do this because it's easy because they don't know what they don't know. Or their nephew starts calling themselves a bookkeeper when they don't know anything about how accounting or bookkeeping works technically. And it is, it is all of these really not great solution providers that you don't want to get lumped in with and is oftentimes why bookkeepers do not get the respect that they deserve. And you could say that same thing on the other side. The notion that tax pros like can't even hold a conversation for six months of the year because they're so under the gun because there are bad ones, oftentimes we can assume that that applies to all of them when on both sides there are ones that are going to be really hard to work with and there's going to be other ones that have their stuff put together. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow and do I have big news for you buddy. Lifflow now supports Xero Xero accounting ledger Xero for the first time. It's big news. I ran a primarily Xero practice and I can tell you what a headache it was to have like some tools that worked with my QuickBooks clients, some tools that worked with my Xero clients drove me nuts. Live Flow, let's just zoom out and recap everything that Lifelo is doing for you because it's bringing everything together. Google Sheets support check Excel support Checkaroo quickbooks online you betcha. Zero support now. Exciting stuff and sneaky sneaky feature like valuable feature consolidations. Consolidations. Being able to roll up a whole bunch of different like chart of accounts that like no matchy matchy required various charts of accounts, rolling them all up in a super simple really nice ui. And then because it's Live Flow, you can pull just about any report from the accounting system into your favorite spreadsheet either one time or on an ongoing basis. Like it continues syncing out and it works across your whole stack now. Okay, I honestly don't know what more they could do for you. Learn more about LifeLow. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Makers Hub. If you Want to lean into the very best of what AI is enabling, like right now. Like, we're not talking hypothetical what it can do soon. We're talking right now. You want to lean into that today. It is upending accounts payable. It just is. Makers Help, we've done several demos of them on the channel now. I had clients who had very complicated accounts payable needs, multiple heinies in seats, processing bills, processing the detail, doing receiving, all the stuff that goes into fiddly inventory management and complex purchasing. We could have streamlined so much of that with Maker's Hub. It's because Makers Hub's using AI vision models to take extraction, like automated extraction, further than has ever been possible before with old OCR tech. We had a whole generation of tools that were built supporting the accounting profession on OCR tech. And man, that stuff is going to get wiped out so fast. Because AI vision models, they can not only see and understand things like, they can not only visually see it like a pull, like handwritten text notes scribbled on top of a computer bill, but it can comprehend and make connections. When you pair that with a language model, that can be like, normally it's like this, but here's what I'm saying. What do you think that means that can get you so much farther? And it creates an interesting place as we are standing up our own services to be like, is this an arbitrage opportunity for firms to step in? Is this a shrinking opportunity? If it's something that, you know all clients are going to adopt over the next five years either way, you know what it is? Is a phenomenal advisory opportunity where we can step in and be like, dang, there's a fundamentally better way to do this. Talked with people who literally have sent my Maker's Hub demo videos to their clients to be like, we need to do this now. And in an age of AI hype where you're kind of getting fed up with all the marketing, right, to see something that is actually crushing. That's really exciting. Makers Hub's doing this really well for ap and we got a few providers starting to do this really well for 1040 tax prep. The exact same technology, AI vision models, pulling stuff off of documents and much more compelling, compelling ways, doing a bit of reasoning and then like getting it way closer to the end zone than OCR ever got it before. If you're thinking about this for bill pay, check out Makers Hub link down in the show notes number three tax pros. By and large, they are going to be deadline divas. You Follow any tax pros on social media. You'll see 50% of posts during deadline seasons is paychecks. Do you know what time of year it is? What are you doing bringing me muffins in March? Do you know who I am? And on the flip side of this, you've got a bunch of folks outside the tax ecosystem that are perpetually frustrated and look at tax pros and are like, what? You can't improve your business. You can't do all these things. What do you mean? Business just stops for six months of the year. You can't have these meta conversations. And the reality is, like, the answer is something in the middle there. Like, there is a degree of like, it's harvest season, stay away. But that can also go way too far where it's like you get your head too down in the weeds of doing the work and you totally lose perspective. Then that's probably not great either. Right now, like I said at the top, a lot of this is probably gonna be about how to navigate the ones who don't do this stuff well and what to look out for. Tax pros. Obviously they're gonna be very busy through 4:15. And I'm talking about generally us tax pros here, but you could probably extend that through April if you really wanna get ahold of em, like May to June. That's probably when you talk about stuff that happened in tax season because. Because when the tax deadline hits, hopefully they take a bit of time off, but then immediately after that, they're straight back into all the things they promised that they would do right after the tax deadline. Again, we're talking about the tax pros who don't have their stuff together, which is a lot of them. And for those, May or June's probably the best bet if you're wanting to connect about early in the year stuff. Otherwise, watch out for September 15th and October 15th. Those are the extended deadlines. Should it be this way? Oh, almost certainly not, but. But does that change the fact that the tax pro is in a crap situation and they're about to miss little Timmy's violin recital and that's why they're not returning your call. They're in the situation that they're in. Should they be in it to begin with? They certainly shouldn't, but that is why they are. Honestly, they can be so intolerable during that busy season. So not an excuse, but something to watch out for if there's a golden hour of, like, when's the best time to connect with a tax pro? If it's about things like adjustments that got made during tax season. You probably want to talk in May or June if it's about the year end close something leading up to year end. Maybe they want to do year end tax planning or you want to get your head around expectations for what they want to see. For the 1231 books, probably October, November is your best bet. After October 15th, that's the last extended deadline or at least major extended deadline. Again, doesn't hurt to ask though, because these are all generalizations and some firms are going to want something different. But this probably covers 75% of tax firms who kind of do things the default way. Okay, number four, many tax pros are not going to be interested in a referral relationship, at least these days. Most US Firms, besides those just starting out, struggle to pick up referrals from their own client base and will oftentimes be like incredibly dismissive of any other source of bringing in clients, which they probably shouldn't be. But for you, this could be an opportunity because for your bookkeeping practice, it'd be really nice if you had a partner like a, not like a actual like equity partner or something, but a firm that you could regularly work with to get that workflow nailed down and deliver things more consistently. And that's where it may be worth looking for a provider that is either early on and still building their tax practice or is working in the same niche as you. If you can specialize a bit and find a tax firm that specializes and they don't have to be local, they could be anywhere. That's a great opportunity for the both of you to kind of double your reach. Because if you can get this system humming, it's going to save both of you a bunch of time. But by and large, a lot of tax pros, like mature firms aren't going to be particularly excited about getting a bunch of referrals. Many of them aren't even taking work at all. Number five, some tax pros will perceive working with the bookkeeper as like an added cost. There's this perception that like talking with you, talking with the bookkeeper, or figuring out how to get adjustments into the books is like doing your job for you. And I can understand how that's very frustrating because it isn't because they will give you scant information or just a pile of journal entries with no description or anything, and you're like, well, what the heck am I supposed to do with these? Yet they will never take the time to have the conversation, to work through all that and then next year comes around and the tax pro is just posting these like giant brute force plug entries that roll up all the changes in the past and like, don't get you any closer to actually having the accounting file in alignment with what they think it should be. And it just kind of comes back to the frustration of many tax pros never digging themselves out of those issues to begin with because they're not willing to stop and have the conversation. But this came up quite a bit when I put out the call on social media tax pros saying things along the lines of, oh, if I have to coordinate with yet another person in addition to the client, this is just adding to the scope of the engagement. I don't know that I would necessarily say that's the case for sure if you're having to like try train a bookkeeper, show them how to do a thing that they don't know how to do. There's yes, there's a bit of work in there, but the opposite is also a lot of work when you're never having conversations and never getting in alignment on how things ought to be. So either end of the extreme doesn't really seem like the solution there. Like there has to be some sort of, some level of collaboration. Number six, when it comes to working with tax firms, there is never going to be such thing as a single standard, like in terms of what their expectations are. Different firms, different tax firms, that is, are going to expect wildly different things. Different accountants within a tax firm will expect different things and even different clients from the same firm and the same accountant will end up being done different ways. You can work with one accountant that does 10 of your companies, and even across those 10 companies, they will do things differently. The best thing you can do is kind of to build up like a database of questions of sort of all the variations you've seen from tax firms and just give them the opportunity to give you some guidance on how you want each of those or how they would like to see each of those engagements. Now, should the tax pro have 100% of the decision making authority here? Probably not, but at least by asking the question, you are starting the conversation. And simply starting the conversation puts you ahead of a ton of bookkeepers who just don't do that. It's usually like the lack of communication that's the problem or, or letting the client play telephone between you and the tax pro. Right, which, which isn't particularly helpful. Number seven, if there is any such thing as a standard that most tax pros ought to be able to agree on it is to try to tie out the books to the Schedule L on the tax return. So the Schedule l on the 1065 or 11, 20, 1120s, you're five or six pages into the tax return. This is sort of the first thing that the Tax Pro checks to make sure, do the prior yearbooks like equal where I left them last year. And if they don't, I have to adjust them to get them back to that. So if you get a file from a client where the prior year ties, honestly, in small business bookkeeping, that's pretty rare. That's probably the case less than 50% of the time with pretty small, small businesses that don't have very mature internal accounting processes or bookkeepers who are not like professional super high level bookkeepers. So you can dazzle the tax bill just by making sure the schedule is going to tie out from the prior year tax return. So if they are doing 2023 tax prep in 2024, what you're looking at is on the 2022 tax return, the schedule L, does the balance sheet tie what 123122 says in the accounting system, looking out for whether it's accrual or cash basis. And in most cases, the tax reporting is going to be cash basis for small businesses. So cash basis, balance sheet, and the accounting file, does it = the 2022 Schedule L? Something to check every time, potentially even before you get to the end of the year, like before the end of 23. And I know that ship is sailed now, but if it doesn't, that's a good time to to ping the Tax Pro and be like, hey, here's what I'm showing. Am I missing some adjustments or something? That is as much of a standard expectation as I think exists because all tax pros have to make sure that ties out in order to start the next year's work. Now, occasionally a tax pro won't report a Schedule L on a tax return, but that is very rare. If that's the case, the Schedule L just won't have anything in it. This episode is sponsored in part by Stanford Tax eight tax firms. You got an eye on that calendar, buddy. Next tax season it is. It's gonna be here before you know it. I know you were thinking about extended deadlines and I don't want to be that guy. But the time to start testing your next tax season workflow, it's now. It's not January when you can't afford for it to go sideways, it's now. Let me tell you About Stanford Tax K big problem with 1040 workflows is asking intelligent questions, putting personalized questionnaires in front of your clients rather than the dumb boilerplate ones that ask a whole bunch of questions that don't apply to them. Right? Stanford Tax. Great way to do it. In fact, they've beefed up the platforms they support. Cch, Access Pro System, fx, Gross ultratax, Lacert Pro Series, Drake Generate personalized questionnaires that only ask the questions they need to using actual pro forma data from their prior year return. Oh my gosh, somebody did it. Only ask the questions you need to ask in a modern web interface, get them to upload the required docs and buddy, you're off to the races. You just asked for all the goodies that you need and none of the goodies that you don't. Leaning into what like web forms can enable for you without losing that like, personal touch. The worst version of completing the thing online is the thing where it's like none of these things apply to me and my tax professional knows that. Okay, so if you're looking for a smarter way to do intake, check out Stanford Tax link down in the show. Notes this episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp. Common question when you are hiring people around the globe, how do you even time zone? When do people work? Do you work at the same time? Do they work at night while you work during the day? Gang, it's your team. You get to make the rules. But common things that people do when they're hiring folks in the Philippines, sometimes they'll just have them stick to your business hours so they will literally work at night during your firm's hours. When I was running a firm, this is what we did. Everybody worked during our hours and it was all pretty straightforward. But increasingly what folks are doing and this is a little easier on on lifestyle because like what, I like to work graveyard myself? Probably not. So is it unfair for me to ask my team to do that? Maybe. But increasingly common now is folks are looking for getting like two to three overlapping hours a day with your team. Now, increasingly this is less of a big deal because we're all sort of moving to a more asynchronous version of work where we're not always hopping on live calls and needing to take meetings and all that trending towards working from anywhere anytime you want. But I can tell you in my firm what I ended up with was we actually had like a three hour block a day where it's like everybody needs to be on during this time each day to take care of any of those synchronous things that may need to happen. Otherwise, go wild. Work whenever you want. And that framework works really well with, with this offshore hiring approach is you pick that two to three hour window during the day when everybody's going to be available. Everybody has to be on then. Otherwise up to them. As long as they're getting their work done, I don't care. At the end of the day, you're making the rules. So if you want them working during your regular business hours, you could certainly do that. They're going to be available all the time. You may be asking a little more of them. So maybe it's harder to find the right folks because they may not want to work at night or bookend it at one end of the day or the other. So when they're getting on, your team's getting off or the other way around. Now, if you want some help to find, find some talented accountants in the Philippines to come work with you. Check out team up, link down in the show notes number eight. Establish an understanding for what's supposed to be capitalized. That is, if somebody buys a printer, does it go on the balance sheet on a fixed asset account or does it go in an expense account? And in most cases for small businesses now, the threshold here is $2,500. If it's at or above that, it goes on the balance sheet. And that is per item, not perfect receipt. So if you spend 3,500 bucks at a Costco and it's a $2,000 thing and a $1,500 thing, you're probably not capitalizing anything from that. But if one of those items is 2,500 or more, it might be something that ought to be capitalized. Now, a business can still set a different threshold there, but if we're talking like broad brush strokes, generalizations, most tax pros are going to use 2,500 bucks for that threshold. If the client wants it to be lower, at the very least, document that fact and communicate it to the tax pro. And if the client wants it to be like a thousand or five hundred bucks or less, maybe consider pulling in the tax pro to talk them out of it because that ends up being a bunch of unnecessary effort. This matters for tax pros because if something does get cap get capitalized, it has to be reported separately on the tax return. And oftentimes they will pull up a balance sheet or an office equipment account and there will be 20 things there that are 100 bucks and they're like, well, these shouldn't be here to begin with. But I'm also not willing to go in and now key all these things into my tax software and track what when they get sold and all that. Because things that small usually just get tossed in the trash or taken to a recycling center. And before you know it, you've got an asset list of hundreds of items that are just kind of unnecessary to manage. So usually the capitalization threshold here is going to be 2,500 bucks. But if it's not, be sure to get a clear understanding of why that is. Number nine, don't be afraid to share your work things. As simple as reconciling the bank. You probably already got that bank statement right and it may have even been marked up. The tax pro is going to go through and do the exact same thing. If there's a way that we can cheat off of each other here, that's helpful, prevents us from doing duplicate work. Same goes on the tax pro side. And a lot of tax pros will be weird about this, like being unwilling to share a work paper or something like that. But by and large, most of the time that's just going to make both of your jobs easier. Number 10, don't get too caught up on trying to figure out why that tax pro doesn't like, like you. It almost certainly has nothing to do with you. That can just kind of be a holes oftentimes. Many tax pros, there's a very real level of like superiority, like they look down on bookkeepers and that's not right. A lot of this stems from the fact that there are just a lot of unprofessional like bookkeeping solutions. For some tax pros, they've actually like a big trend lately has been taking this bookkeeping in house. And so they may see you as a conflict of interest where, well, we wouldn't have any of these problems if we did it in house and we would be in perfect alignment if we did it in house. Let you in on a secret. They would not be in perfect alignment even if they did it in house. But some tax pros will just never emerge from that whole tunnel vision that they have during tax filing season where they don't care about anyone but themselves or getting that project out that they can then bill for. And there's just nothing that you can do to get them out of that. And that's too bad. And that's where maybe trying to invest more in a relationship with somebody that you're super aligned with that's building around the same specialization as you. That's where a more of a partnership approach may make a lot of sense and I don't know, maybe mitigate just how much it could suck, how much it can suck to work with people like that. Like that's, that is not fun. And you deserve better than that to be treated that way. And it would really suck to ruin a good client relationship over an idiot tax pro. It kind of sucks, but it is not something that you need to take personally. All we can do is, is do everything that we can to navigate that professionally. It is not about you. It's about something bigger than you, not bigger than you. It is, it is about that person. It's not about you. Number 11, if you do nail this, if you find a way to weasel your way into kind of a better three way relationship there between you and the tax bro and the client and it adds a bunch of stickiness for all parties involved. It's like we got the whole squad working in unison on this thing and the notion of changing out one part of that squad gets a little bit harder. And so it's just better for everybody if we can find a way to work, to work together. We're probably going to save, save ourselves time. We will make better decisions because we have greater transparency into how everyone else is doing their work and that improves decision making. But there's a certain element of stickiness when you've got like a group that's working together really well, oftentimes behind the scenes where the business owner didn't even need to be bothered and things are just getting resolved. That's really valuable. So if we can build a relationship here, it's going to add some stickiness. And then last, number 12 for bookkeepers, man, don't be afraid to get help. Like be in community with other bookkeepers. Nothing gave me more confidence than being in community with other people who do what I do. Because just like you're gonna get an idiot client that pushes back and you're like, is this reasonable or not? You're gonna get idiot tax pros that push back and you won't always know what to make of it. Like, should I be hard on myself about this? Did I actually do this wrong? Or are they making a wildly unreasonable request? If you're surrounded by other people that do what you do, it's much easier to have a clear perspective around what's reasonable and what's not. And for me, this all started with just engaging in social media and not lurking, not being Afraid to share, boy, this happened today and that kind of sucked. Or here's what I'm working on, here's what I'm excited about and making friends along the way. And those friends who then have a deep understanding of what it is that you do, they become the source of a bunch of confidence because you're like, no, I actually know what I'm doing here. And like, this is not outside of the realm of what's reasonable. It's actually you that's being unreasonable. And here's how we can kind of navigate this. But at least then I'm not stuck with that existential dread of like, is this me? Or I don't even know what's normal. Because the more you surround yourself with other progressive folks who are doing this stuff successfully, the more you are really confident in what normal is. And from there you push to be like, well, like, actually here's a better way. And like, how do we kind of define the future of like, what's a better way to approach these engagements? And does a relationship with the tax bureau have to actually be a prerequisite to work with me? Like, stuff, stuff like that, where that, that confidence becomes the foundation for, for even more exciting things. Lots of smart people having these conversations online. The person who's probably had this conversation more than anybody else in the last year or two is Nancy McClelland. You may have seen her out there, the dancing CPA. She has actually an online community for bookkeepers around just this sort of problem slash opportunity. It's called her ask a CPA community. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. If you, you're a bookkeeper trying to work out like how to best collaborate with tax pros, definitely check that out. You're going to find a whole bunch of bookkeepers having this type of conversation. And when I see a community of like that, I think of it as like a path to confidence, a path to developing a, a, a crystal clear understanding of what's the best way to approach this as validated by a bunch of other people who do what I do. And so if that's something you're struggle, you struggle with, that is so such a worthwhile investment to make. Particularly as, at least in the U.S. sort of professional services ecosystem, tax pros come with a huge amount of weight and authority and they can throw something out or like throw a bookkeeper under the bus and it almost certainly has more weight than it ought to. I think this weight comes from the fact that most entrepreneurs will spend more money on tax than anything else. And so when that tax pro says something, in many ways it's gospel beyond the threshold that it probably should be, particularly as the bar isn't super high for tax pros these days. And we are by all means not all doing phenomenal work, just in the same. Same way that not all bookkeepers are doing phenomenal work. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter how you work with other tax pros, because it does, because they carry a lot of weight in that client relationship. And while navigating that can be really tricky and really frustrating, it is something that we need to be thinking about. Anything. I missed you. I mean, almost certainly. Drop some comments down below. This can be a pretty charged topic. Tomorrow. We're talking about the flip side of this tax pros, what you need to hear or what you need to know about working with bookkeepers. If you tune in for this one, check that one out again. This is the product of a big conversation online, soliciting feedback from a bunch of folks. When you engage instead of lurk, it makes everybody better because they can scroll down to the comments and be like, oh, that's smart. Oh, that's. That's actually a good idea to mitigate this problem or that problem. This is very much a sort of collective solution where it's like, how can we run through a bunch of ideas that'll help us manage this stuff better? That's. That's kind of the best outcome here, is not just to get mad about it, but to come up with some ideas for how to manage this stuff better. So that's all I got for today. You got thoughts, man, Drop it in the comments. This will probably be a spicy one. And I'll see you back here again tomorrow.